When my then-boyfriend proposed, I didn’t get the message.
He asked, “Do you want to marry me?” I took it as a hypothetical question, an invitation to start thinking about a future together. I answered very casually, “Yeah”.
I didn’t understand that he was asking, “Will you marry me?” As in, let’s get engaged right now.
He was speaking my language, but his culture.
Most of us know by now that what we say, our verbal communication, accounts for a relatively small portion of our communication and that the rest lives in other signals, so-called paraverbal, nonverbal and extra verbal communication. Those are things like our tone, volume, facial expressions and body language, attire and timing, to name a few. You know this is true as soon as you consider how much we rely on emojis to convey tone in a text message and how agonizing the three little dots are as the person we’re texting with takes ‘too long’ to respond.
How many of us have considered that all those signals are as closely tied to our culture as the words we choose are tied to our language? Just like my now-husband, it’s easy enough to learn a new language and speak it, but if we still speak our home culture through the new language, we will miscommunicate. Don’t worry, by the look on his face and the ring he offered, I quickly understood and all these years later we’re still communicating more carefully.
One of the biggest nonverbal communication techniques that foreigners in Sweden struggle with is silence. Swedes are kind of famous for not talking much. This gives them a reputation for being (check as many as apply) rude, shy, nativist, depressed. I don’t believe most Swedes would recognize themselves in any of those adjectives and we won’t adjudicate them here.
Tell a Swede that they, taken as a whole, don’t talk much and they may look confused. They know they don’t talk as much as other cultures, but their amount feels so right… to them. It feels, dare I say it, lagom. It might be hard for them to understand why the rest of us are so (unnecessarily) chatty. Indeed, when we talk about it like this, it does sound silly that foreigners have a hard time adjusting to peace and quiet. What’s going on?
Silence is not the absence of communication. It generally falls under paraverbal communication, which is the part of communication having to do with speech, but not being the words themselves. Think tone of voice, speed, volume, emphasis. Silence communicates something. The question is, what? And how should foreigners and immigrants know how to interpret the silence? Ay, there’s the rub. Without growing up in Sweden, there is no way for the rest of us to know what Swedish silence means and in the absence of other indicators, we will simply imagine a meaning. We often get it wrong.
Using silence as a weapon to show another person we are displeased or to punish them by withdrawing our relational presence (the good, old silent treatment), has been documented across a wide range of cultures. Showing contentment or presence or using the silence to contemplate a response is less common. That means the chances non-Swedes interpret silence to be something negative are greater than interpreting it as something positive. There are a lot of us running around wondering what we did wrong to make so many Swedish people so quiet.
Here’s the next rub. Swedes also use silence to indicate displeasure. The difficulty grade to distinguish between a happy, content silence and a disgruntled, miffed one continues rising. Those sound like two very different emotional states. Surely we can base our interpretations on that. Actually, Sweden ranks quite highly toward affectively neutral. Means Swedish culture doesn’t show emotions outwardly, its own type of silence, so we can’t base our interpretations on emotions either. Pheromones might be all we have left. Let’s hope we’re in the same room when the silence happens.
Once we’ve decided Swedish silence indicates a problem, many of us outsiders would like to clear it up. We want to fix our mistakes, apologize for our misdeeds, learn and move forward. We take the topic up, try to address it one way or another and, because Swedes are typically quite conflict-avoidant, we run into a further wall of silence and/or withdrawal.
Quick and easy solutions for this kind of situation simply don’t exist. It would take anyone a lengthy and constant immersion to absorb what each shade of silence means with any degree of certainty. And Swedes would need high levels of both self-awareness and self-denial to motivate going against their habit and explaining themselves.
The advice, then, is to anyone reading this and recognizing themselves on either side of this equation, try to see it from the other person’s perspective. Assume good intentions and stretch yourself toward the other if you can. If silence is hard for you, assume there is nothing malign behind it and trust that if there is, this, too, will be manageable. If speaking feels unnecessary, consider if it’s possible the other person doesn’t share the feeling and what a difference just a few words could make.
What do you use silence for in your communication?
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